Dirty Tricks

Betty Smith

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

The American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century. From the moment she entered the world, Francie needed to be made of stern stuff, for the often harsh life of Williamsburg demanded fortitude, precocity, and strength of spirit. Often scorned by neighbors for her family's erratic and eccentric behavior-such as her father Johnny's taste for alcohol and Aunt Sissy's habit of marrying serially without the formality of divorce-no one, least of all Francie, could say that the Nolans' life lacked drama. By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the Nolans' daily experiences are tenderly threaded with family connectedness and raw with honesty. Betty Smith has, in the pages of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, captured the joys of humble Williamsburg life-from "junk day" on Saturdays, when the children of Francie's neighborhood traded their weekly take for pennies, to the special excitement of holidays, bringing cause for celebration and revelry. Betty Smith has artfully caught this sense of exciting life in a novel of childhood, replete with incredibly rich moments of universal experiences--a truly remarkable achievement for any writer. ...

Thornton Wilder

The Ides of March

Drawing on such unique sources as Thornton Wilder's unpublished letters, journals, and selections from the extensive annotations Wilder made years later in the margins of the book, Tappan Wilder's Afterword adds a special dimension to the reissue of this internationally acclaimed novel. The Ides of March, first published in 1948, is a brilliant epistolary novel set in Julius Caesar's Rome. Thornton Wilder called it "a fantasia on certain events and persons of the last days of the Roman republic." Through vividly imagined letters and documents, Wilder brings to life a dramatic period of world history and one of history's most magnetic, elusive personalities. In this inventive narrative, the Caesar of history becomes Caesar the human being. Wilder also resurrects the controversial figures surrounding Caesar -- Cleopatra, Catullus, Cicero, and others. All Rome comes crowding through these pages -- the Rome of villas and slums, beautiful women and brawling youths, spies and assassins.

John Cleland

Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

'Fanny Hill' scandalised thousands of Victorians with its vivid descriptions of sexual pleasure, and landed its author in court a year after publication on charges of 'corrupting the King's subjects'. This only heightened its allure - and today it is still hugely appreciated as a work of true erotic and literary merit. What's a penniless country girl to do in the big city? Fanny Hill is a blushing country maiden until tragic circumstances force her to seek a new life in London. She is taken in by the motherly Mrs Brown, but on her first night she receives a rather unorthodox welcome from one of the young ladies in the house - and swiftly gains a much more explicit idea of what is expected in her new role. Fanny takes to carnal pleasures with gusto, and she vividly recalls each lusty encounter, every thrusting conquest, in her saucy, voyeuristic and thoroughly irresistible memoirs.